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Within postcolonial studies, Britain's long contact with India has been read generally only within the context of imperialism to inform our understanding of race, gender, identity, and power within colonialism. Such postcolonial interpretations that focus on single dimensions of identity risk disregarding the sense of displacement, discontinuities, and discomforts that compromised everyday life for the British in India—the Anglo-Indians—during the Raj. Imperialism as Diaspora reconsiders the urgencies, governing principles, and modes of being of the Anglo-Indians by approaching Britain's imperial relationship with India from new, interdisciplinary directions. Moving freely between the disciplines of literature, history, and art this new work offers readers a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the lives of Anglo-Indians. Focussing on the years between the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and Independence in 1947—the period of the British Raj in India—Imperialism as Diaspora at once sets in motion the multidisciplinary fields of cultural and social history, art and iconography, and literary productions while carefully maintaining the tension between imperialism and diaspora in a ground-breaking reassessment of Anglo-India. Crane and Mohanram examine the seamless continuum between cultural history, the semiotics of art, and Anglo-Indian literary works. Specifically, they focus on the influence of the Sepoy Mutiny on Anglo-Indian identity; the trope of duty and the white man's burden on the racialization of Anglo-India; the role of the missionary and the status of Christianity in India; and gender, love and contamination within mixed marriages.

This book addresses the idea of'civility'as a manifestation of the fluidity and ambivalence of imperial power as reflected in British colonial literature and culture. Discussions of Anglo-Indian romances of 1880-1900, E.M. Forster's The Life to Come and Leonard Woolf's writings show how the appeal to civility had a significant effect on the constitution of colonial subject-hood and reveals'civility'as an ideal trope for the ambivalence of imperial power itself.

Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues demonstrates the continuing validity of the colonial paradigm as it maps the geographical, political, and imaginative space of'India/Indies'from the seventeenth century to the present. Breaking new ground in postcolonial studies, Jyotsna Singh highlights the interconnections among early modern colonial encounters, later manifestations in the Raj and their lingering influence in the postcolonial Indian nationalist state. Singh challenges the assumption of eye-witness accounts and unmeditated experiences implcit in colonial representational practices, and often left unchallenged in the postcolonial era. Essential introductory reading for students and academics, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues re-evaluates the following texts: • seventeenth century travel narratives about India • eighteenth century'nabob'texts • letters of the Orientalist, Sir William Jones • reviews of Shakespearean productions in Calcutta and postcolonial Indo-Anglian novels